A lifestyle change took place when we moved to our smallholding in Wales, we are leaving behind the consumerism of life, growing our food, raising our meat, living our lives to the full, enjoying every day the highs and lows of country living, but not going without just doing it better.

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Wednesday, 13 August 2014

White or Brown Sugar

You know what its like you plan to cook or bake and find out you don't have enough brown sugar or have any at all, you think about making up the extra with white, that may work but affects the taste, I have been in this situation many times, About 2 years ago I discovered how to make my own brown sugar its so easy.

You need white granulated sugar

to a bag of white sugar add a couple of tablespoons of molasses

and just mix after a few minuets the molasses coat all of the white sugar and you have this

brown sugar, that is all there is to it, if you want a fine brown sugar use caster sugar.

It works out cheaper and since finding this out I have not bought any brown sugar.

So that is one thing I was doing today, the reason I was making up some meals that hubby can take back with him the brown sugar was needed to add to the Tangy Tomato sauce for meatballs

I shall have some tomorrow for dinner with Tagliatelle, hubby isn't a pasta lover so he can have his with whatever he fancies, for tonight's dinner I had Tagliatelle with home made cheese free pesto sauce.

I had always fancied pesto but it always seemed to contain a cheese product,

I don't do cheese so I make my own simple sauce.

Pine Nuts in the blender

Add fresh Basil

blend up together with some olive oil

serve dressed over fresh pasta add some smoked salmon

making your own is quick and easy and you can control your own flavours add more or less of pine nuts and basil and if you want you can add some Parmesan.

I have been shovelling more gravel today in between showers, during the showers I was having a read of my magazine that I picked up a couple of days ago

The latest edition of Home Farmer, this months is very war timed themed with some interesting recipes

Mock Orange marmalade that made me think of Chickpea as its made with carrots and a good article on plumbing repairs that brought Kev to mind.

I've got loads of basil growing and I should make some pesto with it before it all goes to seed, yours sounds good. The last time I brought brown sugar was from lidi so it was pretty cheap although I do like your tip (I need to buy some molasses now!).Next plumbing project is to turn the outside tap so it's the right way up. Should be about as fun as putting my fingers in a plug socket.

Well I would never have thought about making brown sugar, thanks for sharing that tip. The pesto looks good, I love pesto, I don't know why I have never got around to making it. By coincidence, I bought last months Home Farmer for the first time, it caught my eye as it had a section on preserves. What an interesting magazine, I will definitely get this one if it has carrots recipes in it :)

Treacle is the British generic name for any syrup made during the refining of sugar cane. Therefore, theoretically, Treacle, Black Treacle, Molasses, Golden Syrup and Blackstrap are all treacle’s.

In practice however, there is a technical difference between “treacle” and “Molasses” in that molasses is obtained from the drainings of raw sugar during the refining process and treacle is made from the syrup obtained from the sugar

Greetings from a fellow England-to-Carmarthenshire incomer. I followed frugalinsuffolk's link here for your brown sugar recipe, and will add Molasses to my shopping list today and try this over the weekend. Great idea and so simple.